waka waka waka

waka waka waka wishes all of you happiness, good health, and good luck in 2006.

The new Moon of December 31st will be the second one this month; the first having been on December 1st. When two full Moons occur in the same calendar month, it’s called a “Blue Moon”, but till now there has been no name for this inverse phenomenon. The folks at Spaceweather.com asked for suggestions for their readers, and the winner was “Ebony Moon”. Like Blue Moons, Ebony Moons happen about once every two-and-a-half years. The next one will be in August of 2008.

As I was walking home from the kwoon this evening, having spent a pleasant few hours first enlightening my students as to the subtleties of the “crane’s wing”, and later practicing the Ng Lung Ba Gwa Cheung, I noticed some books lying in the street, about to be ruined by the rain. I took a closer look, and what I found was the Sixth Edition of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, a fabulous resource published in 1975, and what appears to be a first-edition hardcover copy of Lewis Copeland’s The World’s Great Speeches (from Pericles to Roosevelt), published in 1942.

How can anyone just throw such treasures overboard? Onto the shelf they go.

Mullah Nasrudin was on his hands and knees in the street. A friend saw him, and came over to ask what he was up to.

“Mullah! What are you doing?”

“Because the light’s better here, of course!”

Educational and psychological theories of the mid-20th century saw the human brain as an infinitely flexible learning machine, with no “factory presets”. But the picture that is now emerging of our mental apparatus is of a suite of prewired cognitive modules, located in various areas of the brain, each of which has been shaped by natural selection for some useful task. These modules provide us with a common a priori framework for organizing our model of the world, and each module contributes an intuitive description of some aspect of our environment.

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“Just as a monkey roaming through the forest grabs hold of one branch, lets that go and grabs another, then lets that go and grabs still another, so too that which is called ‘mind’ and ‘mentality’ and ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another by day and by night.”

(Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p. 595)

To all of you. May your homes be havens of peace and love, may you grow in wisdom and understanding, and may fortune smile upon you in 2006.

-Malcolm

There are many in the scientific community, including some of its most prominent spokespersons, who seem to have embraced a rather militant form of atheism. Richard Dawkins seems to be the most visible just now, but there are many others.

I used to be a strongly committed atheist myself, but my viewpoint has softened, and I would categorize myself now as a curious agnostic. One of the reasons that I abandoned the atheist position is the simple fact that reason itself is silent on the question of God’s existence. Efforts have been made to put faith in God onto a solid naturalist or philosophical foundation, but the fact remains that there is still no way to compel either belief in or denial of the existence of God.

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One of the things that people who dislike George Bush often mention as something that particularly bothers them is what they call his “swagger”. I too have found myself vaguely irritated by his carriage, without realizing what it was that bothered me. I’ve now put my finger on it.

I’ve noticed in the past that both hypertrophic bodybuilders and the grossly obese share a postural trait - the arms, when hanging at one’s sides, not being able to lie closely against the body, are pushed out and forward, which rotates the hands so that the palms, instead of being turned toward each other, face straight backward. This is also how gorillas and troglodytes are always drawn, knuckles dragging on the ground. If you look at most men of normal girth you will see the hands hanging with the palms facing the body, more or less, but when George Bush walks his palms face generally aft. It has a marked, if subliminal, visual effect.

Not having heard anybody point this out before, I thought I’d better mention it here.

Science, the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has published its Top Ten list of scientific breakthroughs for 2005. The winners are:

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This transit strike has the city clenched and writhing like a spider stuck by a pin. Businesses are withering, traffic is packed solid from river to river, and municipal and union officials are locked in a snarling impasse, while Gotham’s hapless and frozen workforce staggers to and fro across the city’s bridges in their hundreds of thousands. And all of this four days before Christmas.

New York is rightly renowned for taking such things in stride, but this one is going to get old in a hurry.

One of my favorite left-clicks in all of cyberspace is WikiPedia’s Random Article link. Here’s a typical sequence:

Hagop Hagopian
1636 in literature
Mutawintji National Park
Pindall, Arkansas
United States Chess Federation
Anita King
Historicity of Jesus

You never know what you’re going to get.

The campaign by Biblical literalists to have their mythology masquerade as science in the public schools has been dealt another setback. In a welcome and much-needed decision, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones has struck down the Dover Township, PA school board’s attempt to smuggle “Intelligent Design” into the biology curriculum.

You can read the judge’s opinion here.

Well, the bus-and-subway strike is on. New York depends on mass transit more than any other city in the country, and this is going to be very bad indeed, especially given the timing.

The strike might last a while, as the two sides - the government and the Transport Worker’s Union - seem unable to do anything more constructive than to huff and puff and wag their fingers at one another. And as usual the ones who will suffer the most are the blameless working folks, into whose faces the weather always blows, regardless of which direction the wind comes from.

From Hans Zinsser’s scholarly and delightful book Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, After Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever comes the following:

More than any other species of animal, the rat and mouse have become dependent on man, and in doing so they have developed characteristics which are amazingly human. In the first place, like man, the rat has become practically omnivorous. It eats anything that lets it and - like man - devours its own kind, under stress. It breeds in all seasons and - again like man - it is most amorous in the springtime. It hybridizes easily, and, judging by the strained relationship between the black and the brown rat, develops social or racial prejudices against this practice. The sex proportions are like those among us. Inbreeding takes place readily. The males are larger, the females fatter. It adapts itself to all types of climates. It makes ferocious war upon its own kind, but has not, as yet, become nationalized. So far it has still stuck to tribal wars - like man before nations were invented. If it continues to ape man as heretofore we may, in a few centuries, have French rats eating German ones, or Nazi rats attacking Communist or Jewish rats; however, such a degree of civilization is probably not within the capabilities of any mere animal.

The book is lighthearted, erudite, and without question the best book about vermin and pestilence you have ever read.

I expect that most of you have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but you may not have seen the preface that he wrote for a Ukrainian edition. The preface was censored in England, and was not added to most English translations. I certainly hadn’t seen it before my friend Duncan Werner sent me a link to it today.

Orwell’s prolegomenon talks about self-imposed literary censorship in midcentury England regarding the USSR and Josef Stalin, who was greatly admired by the intellectual Left.

The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicize famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine.

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President Bush yesterday owned up to having authorized the N.S.A. to monitor the private communications of US citizens without the need to obtain a court order. I realize we are at war, but this is wrong, and I am angry about it. I am annoyed not only because it is exactly the sort of thing that goes on in the Orwellian police states we are supposed to be setting ourselves in opposition to, but also because I have at considerable social cost defended the Bush administration’s foreign policy for years now, while he can’t even manage to keep up his end of the bargain by not appearing at every opportunity to be exactly the conniving and hubristic autocrat his more hysterical opponents have always made him out to be.

Obviously his political foes will seize hungrily upon this. I think it is going to be a very serious problem for him, and rightly so.

As I write, Gotham is on the edge of its seat. We are waiting to see if the transit workers, whose contract expired twenty-eight minutes ago, are going to walk out. If they do, it will be disruptive, to say the least. Estimates of the cost to the city’s economy start, I believe, at around four hundred million dollars a day. It also couldn’t come at a worse time for the city’s merchants, some of whom make their entire annual profit during the Yuletide purchasing spasm.

I am not working on any recording projects at the moment, so there are no studios for me to get to, and in my capacity as a software developer for PubSub I won’t be adversely affected - it is as easy for me to spawn bugs at home as it is in our Financial District command center, thanks to the miracle of Open VPN. But many will be deprived of their livelihood, and our colossal engine of commerce, the very heartbeat of capitalism itself, will certainly sputter, if not stall.

I wonder about something, though. There are seven hundred twenty-two miles of subway in the city, and God knows how many miles of bus routes; at any given moment the trains and buses can be at any point on their respective lines. Presumably the operators and conductors themselves get to work by train or bus; if the strike is called, and the wheels must stop rolling, where do they leave the vehicles, and how do they get home? It’s awfully nasty out tonight.

I ran across this, from Peggy Noonan, in this morning’s WSJ newsletter:

Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment, said of the administration that they lied us into war. He left no doubt that he meant they did it deliberately and cynically. But there seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I’ve never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn’t it? Or try to? Yet they were candid.

Wouldn’t it be good if our serious journalists and historians looked into what happened to weapons that Saddam once used and once had? He abused weapons inspectors who came looking, acting like a man who had a great deal to hide. And wouldn’t it be good for our serious journalists and historians to look into exactly how it is that faulty intelligence, of such a crucial nature and at such a crucial moment, came to America and Britain? It is still amazing. Oh, for journalists and historians who would look only for truth and not merely for data that justify their politics and ideology.

As long as I am exposing myself to the scorn of my more dovish friends anyway, I thought I might as well share this item. I don’t always enjoy Ms. Noonan; she is unquestionably an excellent writer, but manages sometimes to combine her natural haughtiness with an affected folksiness in a way that I find irritating. But she makes an excellent point here.

Norman Podhoretz, one of the most articulate representatives of the “neoconservative” school of political thought, had an excellent article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. In it he likens the “panic” among the Left regarding our efforts in Iraq to the “sunshine patriots” of the Revolutionary War. The term refers to those who began to question and undermine the wisdom of the venture after it became apparent that it might actually be a long and arduous struggle.

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I live in one of the “bluest” neighborhoods of one of the bluest cities in the nation, the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. It is a lovely place, with splendid Victorian architecture, and it adjoins one of the world’s great city parks, Prospect Park, which is right at the end of my block. We have a fascinating, complex mix of educated and creative people here. The neighborhood prides itself on tolerance and inclusion.

But the fact of the matter is that you are only tolerated and included if you consider it axiomatic that any reasonable person:

a) opposed (and still conspicuously opposes, ad nauseam) the war in Iraq;
b) believes that George Bush is a literal incarnation of absolute evil;
c) agrees that any idea supported by the Republican party is by definition not just wrong, but malicious;
d) considers John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 election to be not only the work of criminal sabotage, but also the greatest catastrophe to befall civilization since the sack of Rome;
e) regards any unwelcome developments in the world (terrorism, global warming, or even, mind-bogglingly, last year’s tsunami) to be the result of malevolent US government policies…

… and on and on. An infinite, humorless cataract of sanctimonious and dogmatic loathing.

Although I am really neither of the Left nor the Right, but rather am “all over the map” on an issue-by-issue basis, I’ve pretty much just learned to keep my opinions to myself, as there is simply no profit in doing otherwise.

Apart from that, though, what a nice place to live! Concerts in the summer, no crime to speak of, lots of good food, convenient subways…

It’s been a good place to raise two children, too. Just mind what you say.

I love the English language. I love its immense vocabulary, largest of them all. I love its rich history of assimilation, which began with multiple invasions of the scepter’d isle itself, continued with the Earth-girdling expansion of the Empire, and which, with English now the international language of science and commerce, still shows no sign of abatement.

It is a tricky, idiosyncratic tongue, full of broken rules and irregular spellings, in which a single string of letters can take a bewildering variety of pronunciations (consider cough, though, through, plough, and rough). But from the pen or tongue of a master - one such as Shakespeare, Churchill, Joyce, Nabokov, Perelman, Tennyson, Austen, Twain, Wodehouse, Dickens, Pope, Swift, Shelley - the English language can lilt, command, evoke, arouse, describe, amuse, exalt, gladden, inform, seduce, provoke, abash, and delight with incomparable beauty, power and nuance.

But the icing on the cake is Cockney rhyming slang.

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Here in the Western world, we tend to lionize those with the “big” personalities - the people who, brimming with confidence and untrammeled by self-doubt, bask in the glow of public attention as they go about their important business. They are the envy of all, and serve as models for the aspiring. Even the word “lionize” is telling - we admire the lion for his fierceness, courage, and power, but most of all for his dominance. The lion gets what he wants. Should we, then, be lions too, if we intend to get what we want? The answer is not so simple: it all depends on what we want.

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I’ve been distracted by worldly matters for a day or two, so all I have to offer tonight is yet another of those parasitic posts in which I merely present a link to some interesting spot on the Web. Rest assured that some tasty confections are on the stove.

Today’s referent is the indispensible Dead or Alive. Just go take a look. No further explanation necessary.

Found this recently:

An Illustrated Glossary of Rhetorical Terms

It’s all there, from “accumulation” (figure wherein a rhetor gathers scattered points and lists them together) to “zeugma” (use of a word to modify or govern two or more words although its use is grammatically or logically correct with only one). Here are some other goodies:

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A common idea in esoteric teachings is the notion that we live our lives too mechanically, that we are in fact in a kind of waking sleep. The notion seems silly at first. Of course we aren’t asleep! Sleep is what we do at night in our beds. During our busy, productive days we are conscious, we are active, we are engaged. But consciousness is a tricky business, and one of its sneakier properties is that it can’t see its own edges. To put that another way, it takes consciousness to be aware of consciousness, and that means that unconsciousness cannot be aware of itself.

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Our Secretary of State is feeling the heat over in Europe, where many a garment is being rent over our use of “secret” places of detention. I certainly agree that we must avoid violating the very principles we stand for in order to defend them, but there is a moral calculus involved that is not as simple as our disingenuous “allies” would have us think they think. Charles Krauthammer makes a cogent analysis of the question here.

The supercilious attitude of our Continental chums, who would undoubtedly be complaining, if not in German, then in Russian, were it not for previous American foreign-policy positions, is also examined in an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. A brief excerpt:

One of Europe’s moral conceits is to fret constantly about the looming outbreak of fascism in America, even though it is on the Continent itself where the dictators seem to pop up every couple of decades. Then Europe dials 9-11, and Washington dutifully rides to the rescue. The last time was just a few years ago, as U.S. firepower stopped Slobodan Milosevic, who had bedeviled Europe for years.

Recommended reading.

My friend Duncan Werner has sent me a link to a brief but outstandingly informative article that I would like to share with you all. It offers a great deal of helpful, practical advice about what to do should you find yourself unexpectedly free-falling from the stratosphere. Not only is the essay chock-full of encouraging tips and pointers, it’s a nice bit of writing, too. Here is how the author, one David Carkeet, sets up the situation:

Let’s say your jet blows apart at 35,000 feet. You exit the aircraft, and you begin to descend independently. Now what?

What, indeed? You or I would probably be pretty glum at this point, but this is nothing we can’t handle, the author reassures us:

Sure, you’ll take a few hits, and I’m not saying there won’t be some sweaty flashbacks later on, but you’ll make it. You’ll sit up in your hospital bed and meet the press. Refreshingly, you will keep God out of your public comments, knowing that it’s unfair to sing His praises when all of your dead fellow-passengers have no platform from which to offer an alternative view.

I recommend that all of you drop what you’re doing and read this item at once. (Unless, of course, you were about to spend some more time poking around in here. Do that first.) If you don’t read it now, you’re sure to forget, and sometime later, plummeting through the azure void, with your laptop hibernating happily back in the overhead compartment, you’re really going to kick yourself. Just remember:

Here is an interesting item from the 1010 WINS website. The headline reads:

Jogging Song Offends Relatives of Inmates

According to the story,

More than 50 recruits and their trainers jogged in formation past the jail last week singing: “Jailbirds, jailbirds, look and see. You’re locked up and we’re free.”

Relatives, who were in the jail parking lot, say they were shocked.

I agree that the doggerel in question scans poorly, but I hardly consider myself shocked. After all, if these recruits had the lyrical skill to be successful poets, they wouldn’t have to be out there jogging in the first place.

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What’s that breeze? Oh. John Kerry is at it again. The lugubrious, thatch-crowned Ent, whom readers may recall bloviating on all sides of every issue during last year’s depressing presidential campaign, was on “Face the Nation” yesterday, accusing US soldiers of “terrorizing” ordinary Iraqis, and “breaking sort of the customs of the–of–the historical customs, religious customs.”

Mr. Kerry has been roundly lambasted in the blogosphere already, so I won’t pile on. I shall instead refer the reader to James Taranto’s mention of it in today’s Best of the Web.

I am really neither conservative nor liberal politically, but am, instead, all over the map on an issue-by-issue basis. Nevertheless I always enjoy, and highly recommend, James Taranto’s daily newsletter. Mr. Taranto takes a strongly conservative stance, but has a light touch and, above all, a sense of humor, which is a nice afternoon break from the Left’s ceaseless cataract of sanctimony and “outrage”. I can’t link directly to the subscription form, but you can go the the Best of the Web homepage and find it from there.

There is a heartening item in today’s New York Times: the creation myth known as Intelligent Design is having a tough time taking root. The ID movement’s complete and unsurprising lack of any scientific agenda is apparently beginning to catch up with it.

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There are some new and interesting threads unwinding over at Bill Vallicella’s website, the Maverick Philosopher. Currently under examination are “mystical” teachings, in particular Buddhism. But in particular there was one little post, seemingly unrelated, that caught my eye. In this brief piece Bill presents a lamentably problematic question: should we think for ourselves?

The problem is that if we do, we are unlikely to find and correct our errors. But unquestioning submission to authority is an obvious mistake also, as witness the horrors of Nazism. What to do?

I think that the esoteric traditions have something to say about this question.

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I love chess. I’ve been playing since I was just a little boy. I’m no master, nor will I be, but I can play a decent game, and every now and then I have played an excellent one.

Chess is one of those rare examples of something that is just right. It seems to me sometimes that there are certain human creations that resonate, somehow, as if they were positioned precisely in some sort of cosmic “sweet spot”. The adagio cantabile from Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. Michaelangelo’s David. My friend David Wolfert’s vintage Stratocaster. Baseball. Steak for Two at Peter Luger’s.

I could go on for a while with those, but you get the point.

Chess seems perfectly tuned. Eight squares by eight. Add a rank or a file, and you ruin the sweet symmetry. Add both, and the resulting combinatorial explosion would turn a comprehensible microcosm into merely another confusing problem to solve. The transcendent beauty of the eight-by-eight arena in which chess is played is that it somehow boils down all of the essential aspects of human struggle into a model that we can fit in our minds all at once. At ten by ten, it just hasn’t been boiled enough.

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It is easy for us to bustle though our busy lives without pausing to reflect that much of our familiar and comfortable world was not created by us, but was, rather, bequeathed to us by those who lived and died long before we took our cue to strut briefly upon the stage. Here in Gotham one tends to take the city itself for granted, as if it were a given feature of the natural world; but if one stops to consider that every last brick, every nail, every floorboard, every window, every doorknob, every layer of paint in every one of the city’s innumerable structures, from the meanest toolshed to the loftiest tower, was carefully put in its place by some human hand, the scale of one’s indebtedness to those who went before us becomes almost ungraspable in its immensity. To these multitudes, almost all of them nameless, dead and forgotten, we owe nearly everything - our cities, our nations, our languages, our religions, our music, our literature, our science, our mathematics, our art, our culture, and even the very bodies that we inhabit. I think it is important to dwell on this astonishing fact every so often.

From my remarkable friend George Beke, who might best be described as a cultural archeologist, and who is a tireless and erudite scholar of the symbolic and esoteric artifacts of bygone times, comes an insight into one of the most familiar features of our common cultural framework - the days of the week.

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Today, November 30, was Winston Churchill’s birthday. He would have been 131.

Like many, I regard Winston Churchill as perhaps the greatest man of the twentieth century. He alone sounded the tocsin as Germany rearmed. His measureless optimism and indomitable spirit gave the British the sinew to stand alone against the Nazis after his warnings went unheeded. His ringing oratory sustained the fighting spirit of a battered nation. His literary output, and his incomparable command of his beloved language, would make him a towering figure even had he confined himself solely to writing. His six-volume history, The Second World War, is unique in all of literature - a spellbinding account of one of mankind’s greatest struggles, written not just by a gifted historian, but by the leader of a dauntless nation, and the architect of civilization’s ultimate victory.

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Looking over the science section of the New York Times yesterday I found the following response to an article about hypnosis (sixth letter down):

To the Editor:

Re “This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis”: The first thing that came to mind when I read that some people are susceptible to suggestion is the trance some religious fundamentalists get into. The article goes on to say that suggestion changes what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

That would explain the apparent contradiction in our most recent presidential election, where logic seemed to be turned on its head.

Was that 10 to 15 percent who could have been in a hypnotic trance enough to turn around an election and in essence undermine (undermind) the democratic process?

Mark Gretch
Raleigh, N.C.

What idiotic, insulting, execrable drivel.

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